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Customize your YouTube video
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
So how did I get this crap image as the first frame of a YouTube video? Well I will show you so you can do the same thing!
- Find a video you want to embed. For this example I will use http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0FAaah8jgY
- Note and copy its “video_id”, which in this case is “U0FAaah8jgY” from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0FAaah8jgY
- Get the video’s “t-code”. This can be done by doing a view source of the video page and looking for the code between “&t=” and the next “&” in a section that has this. In our example, this “t-code” would be “OEgsToPDskJXsoy4CQ56hZR-A204DL4a” from id=U0FAaah8jgY&l=209&t=OEgsToPDskJXsoy4CQ56hZR-A204DL4a&s=21556AB
- Now create the image you want to use and upload it to your site or an image hosting site. I would recommend using a JPG with dimensions of 425 x 325. Anything with a proportion that is away from that will look stretched out and not so nice. Copy the URL for your image.
- You are now ready to produce the code. In the following piece of code, replace
with your video_id from step 2, with your t-code from step 3, and with your image from step 4. Note that your image URL should NOT have the http:// in there. <object width="425" height="350">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/<video_id>"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/p.swf?video_id=<video_id>&eurl=&iurl=http%3A//<image>&t=<t-code>" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>
- Finished! Now simply copy your new code from above into the HTML of your site and you have a YouTube video with a custom first frame. Enjoy!
Facebook doesn’t like my script :(
Saturday, September 16, 2006
UPDATE: Since I no longer use Facebook and deleted my account with them, I put the code back up. Get it here: http://www.nemik.net/code/facebook-rss.zip and let me know if you like it.
Facebook decided it did not like my script for RSSing the ‘News Feed’ feature. I guess the lawyers are still on a leash to keep from ripping me to shreds.
I decided not escalate the issue further knowing that their lawyers probably could rip me to shreds and I’m not currently interested in testing their abilities in doing so.
Facebook’s e-mail:
“Hey Nemanja,
I’m an engineer at Facebook and I’m writing to ask you to please discontinue
using and providing for download your RSS script (for scraping News Feed).
We applaud your efforts at extending the use of Facebook, but unfortunately
we cannot allow automated scripts to access our site for any reason. If you
review the Terms of Service (located at http://facebook.com/terms.php) you
will see the following sentence beneath Member Conduct:“Additionally, you agree not to use automated scripts to collect information
from the Service or the Web site or for any other purpose.”We’ve disabled your account for now, but if you’ll get back to me when
you’ve removed the script (and discontinued using it) I will be happy to
re-enable your account.
We’d obviously like to resolve this without getting the lawyers involved if
possible, so please get back to me as soon as possible so our legal
department doesn’t get all fired up about this.
Thanks,
Chris Putnam
Facebook Engineer
http://facebook.com/p.php?id=13&l=7f32d95924”
So the script is no longer being hosted on my site. Thanks to all who commented on it and helped perhaps improve it.
Facebook News Feed RSS
Wednesday, September 6, 2006
What up everyone?
The new Facebook feature of showing all the minor details of everyone on their home page got me thinking. This is exactly the type of info that one might want in something like say…and RSS feed?
So the past few hours I’ve spent coding up a little PHP script that will log in to Facebook for you, get that whole feed thing, and put it in crude, simple RSS 2.0 feed.
It was developed using PHP 5 but I think should also work with 4.3.x so long as the ‘dom’ module, curl and libcurl with SSL are installed. I think most webhosts these days have that.
So the script, just put in your Facebook email and password into the facebook-rss.php script in the correct variables. ($login_email and $login_password). Then just hit that page with an RSS reader and it should then tell your all those details you’d see only in RSS format. Perhaps would made a nice google.com/ig module?
Not sure how useful this will be to anyone but it was fun for me to write it. It is also released under the MIT license so that anyone can view, edit, do whatever they want with the source.
So without further ado: FACEBOOK RECENTLY CLOSED MY ACCOUNT AND THREATENED TO BRING ON THEIR LAWYERS IF I DO NOT REMOVE THE SCRIPT. I HAVE DECIDED MY CURRENT LAWSUIT-FREE LIFESTYLE IS NOT WORTH THE SCRIPT. JUST KIDDING 
Be sure to let me know what you think and how terribly coded it is. I ran out of beer.
Tesseract: Google re-releases HP’s OCR tool
Tuesday, September 5, 2006
You can check it out here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tesseract-ocr
Tesseract is a tool HP released a while ago for recognizing text within images.
I just compiled and ran it. Seems cool but only works with tiff files and so far I’ve only gotten it working with their sample included file. Using Ubuntu and with the standard GCC compiler stuff on there it compiles no problem.
Just do ‘./configure’ then ‘make’. ‘Make install’ does not seem to be supported yet, and the executable gets created within the ccmain directory.
I tried taking some PNG’s with plain text on a white background and using the ‘convert’ tool to convert it to a tiff. A tiff is created but the OCR cannot read it. Oh well.
Anyone else using this? Getting interesting results?
Don’t leave traces
Monday, August 21, 2006
Many of you probably know about the leaked aol searches that happened a while ago. Besides being completely hilarious they also made people aware of the fact that search engines store all your search results, being logged in to the services makes it all the easier for them too.
So to alleviate that at least a little bit, I have written a little Greasemonkey extention that routes the searches you would normally make on Google, Yahoo!, or MSN through a secure search proxy over at http://www.blackboxsearch.com.
Just install Greasemonkey, install the script from here (http://www.nemik.net/blackboxsearch.user.js) and visit your Google, personalized googe.com/ig, Yahoo, or MSN page as normally. But whenever you do a search it will go through the anonymous proxy so that Google and others cannot keep track of your searches. 
Let me know what you think of it. Also be sure to check out a much cooler aim at screwing up Google’s and other search engines’ datamining methods: http://www.lostinthecrowd.org.
Letmeparty.com now supports MySpace Blogs!
Thursday, August 10, 2006
So I finally learned cURL well enough to make Letmeparty.com decent at posting MySpace blog entries through the SMS system.
It is free as always but not extensively tested, so any and all feedback is of course appreciated!
I hope you enjoy it.
Easy (IMO) way to mass-backup all your TextAmerica pictures
Friday, June 23, 2006
As many of you may be aware, TextAmerica.com plans to shut down its free service accounts and wants to hold your pictures hostage. Starting July 1st, you will have to sign up by paying $99/year and they provided no way to retrieve your pictures if you decide to cancel the account.
So being a nice guy, I’ve made a way for you to do that. Check it out here: http://ta.nemik.net
Post to your blog with SMS
Sunday, March 26, 2006
I just made a small site during my spring break that allows people to post to their blogs via SMS text messaging. You add your blogs to the site along with your phone number and when you send an SMS to the special number, it posts that message to all your blogs!
Check it out and let me know what you think: http://www.letmeparty.com